DPs in the Polish Triangle, Chicago, 1950s

When we came to America in 1951, we soon settled in Chicago where there was and still is a huge Polish community. My parents, however, mainly associated with other DPs. They felt that the Poles who had come before, what people called the "old immigration," didn't much care for the DPs. We were the poor, the huddled masses, the wretched refuse of Europe's shore--like in Emma Lazarus's poem on the Statue of Liberty--and the Poles who were here already didn't much want anything to do with DPs who reminded them of what poverty and dirt and need were like. Or at least this was the way we saw it.

My parents called the older immigrants Warsavjaki (forgive my spelling). The older immigrants tended to treat the DPs like farmers/yokels/hillbillies, and the DPs tended to look on the older immigrants as effete, pretentious, hi-falutin’ urbanites. There wasn't a lot of social commerce going on between the two groups.

When we first came to Chicago, we settled in what's been called the Polish Triangle, an area bordered by California, Milwaukee, and Division. I don't know how many Poles there were there, but it felt like everyone was a Pole. A lot of the store owners, priests, cops, trash men, teachers, librarians, either spoke Polish or had family that spoke Polish. You would walk past stores that had signs that said, “Mowimy Po Polsku” (We speak Polish). There were taverns and restaurants too with names that reminded the DPs of home: Sawa, The White Eagle, Old Warsaw.

But not everything was like a scene from some old movie about the American Melting Pot and how it worked to make us all a happy family of Americans. There were people who looked at DPs like they were vermin. We got some of this from the older Polish immigrants, and we got this from some some non-Poles too. I remember walking around with my father looking for rooms on Milwaukee Avenue that we could rent, and having people turn us away when they heard we were DPs. DPs were dirty, unreliable. They were drunkards, wife beaters, criminals, and bar fighters.

I'm not sure why this was. I would have thought that people would have been sympathetic to the DPs, aware of the kinds of trials and struggles they had experienced in the slave labor and concentration camps, but maybe I'm being naive. People probably just saw DPs as another problem, guys and gals after their jobs on the assembly lines at the Motorola and Zenith plants, or down at the docks in Calumet City or Navy Pier.

At first when we came to America, we lived in single rooms. We would rent a room in an apartment on Belden Avenue or Hamilton Street, and there would be other DP families renting other rooms in this apartment. I remember our first Christmas in the US. We were living in one of these rooms and a guy dressed as Santa was going from room to room passing out simple toys to the DP kids in those rooms. I got a tin army tank and a ball with a star on it. My sister got a jack in the box. America didn’t seem so bad.

All the time, my parents were working. My father worked the day shift, and my mother worked the night shift. This way there would usually be somebody home with my sister and me. My parents did this for years. Sometimes my dad would work two shifts, the 8am to 4pm, and the 4 pm to midnight shift; and he would do this 6 days a week. He wouldn't come home except on Saturday night, and then he would stay until Monday morning. When he was away working his double shifts, he slept in a room in the factory. I remember visiting him once. He had a cot to sleep on and a little box to store his stuff.

He and my mother worked in all kinds of factories, string factories, TV factories, perfume factories. My mother even worked for a time in a factory making walkie-talkies for the GIs fighting against the Communists in Korea. She worked the punch presses in the molding room. She’d come home with burn scars on her arms from the black plastic that melted and settled on them. Fifty years later when she was in a hospice dying from a stroke, I held her hand, and I could still read the scars there.

All of this crazy work my parents were doing started bringing in enough money so that we were moving out of the single rooms into double rooms and then whole apartments and then into an apartment in a building my parents bought at 2633 Potomac in Chicago. It must have been 1954, three years after we got to America, that they bought that first building.

Reading over this, I feel like I'm almost writing about the great American success story. The immigrants who come here with nothing but sand in their pockets; and in a couple of years, they're buying apartment buildings and driving around in black Cadillacs, smoking fat Cubans and dreaming about dating Marilyn Monroe--but it wasn't like that.

The war had come down like a hammer on my parents, and they were still reeling from the blow. My father drank whenever he could. He never drank when he was working but when he wasn’t working he would be down at the White Eagle tavern on the corner or down at the Sto Lat tavern on the next block. He was a black-out drunk. The only thing that would stop him from drinking was getting so drunk that he would pass out. When I got older, I would be sent to look for him in the bars on Division Street. I would find him pretty much gone, still able to walk but barely. I would help him make the trip home. Sometimes, I couldn’t get him up the stairs to our second floor apartment, and I would set him down in the basement where he would sleep it off.

When he would drink, what he wanted to do was talk about the war to anybody. He would talk about the camps and the beatings he got and what happened to him and his friends. And he would talk about the great Polish generals of the Second World War, Sikorski and Anders, and how the Polish soldiers fighting along side the Allies took revenge on Hitler and the Germans for what they did to Poland and Warsaw, how they leveled both like they were wooden outhouses. He loved to sing the songs that came out of the war, especially the one about the red poppies that covered the battlefield of Monte Cassino where so many Polish soldiers died, fighting up that mountain in the middle of the boot of Italy. I can still hear his voice getting deeper and quieter as he sang about those poppies and how the blood of the Poles can still be seen in those red flowers.

He also used to carry around a picture of a gallows in Germany where 5-6 Poles were hanging. He would take this into the bars with him and show it to whomever he could, and he would start talking about what happened to these men and the others in the concentration and slave labor camps he had been in. The photograph finally got so ragged from being passed around in the bars on Division Street that there was nothing left of it but tatters. After my father died, I looked for that photo in the shoebox of old pictures my mom kept under the TV set. I couldn't find it. He must have been carrying the tatters around in his old age.

But losing that old gallows picture didn’t matter to him, because he could also talk about the scar on his head, and he could point to his dead eye, the one that never closed. He would tell strangers about how he was clubbed by a Nazi guard for refusing to eat soup that was so inedible that even a starving man – which he was – would have to think twice before spooning that stuff into his mouth.

Sometimes, I would get my drunk father home, and my mother would start in. Normally, she was very quiet, unemotional, almost frozen. But when she saw him like this, she would explode.

She hated his drinking, and she would slap him and kick him and curse him. I learned all the Polish swear words I needed to know from her: psia krev, pierron, schlag trafi, kurva matzh, and others. He would just lie on the floor and take it. Sometimes he would try to crawl away from him, and she’d follow him across the living room floor, kicking him or beating him with a broom. He never raised a hand to hit her. He would just say, “yes, I deserve it” or “I’m sorry, Tessa.” That’s what he would call her, that or Mamusha. That means mother in Polish.

She would explode like this sometimes when she felt that my sister Donna had done something wrong too. If she sassed her, or refused to eat something my mother prepared, or tried to get out of watching me, my mother would slap her or chase her around the house with a broom. My sister would try to hide even under a bed, but my mother would get her, drag her out and beat her. As my sister got older, she would realize that there was no place in the house that she could hide so she ran outside, ran into the night, and after my mother quieted down, I would go out looking for my sister, trying to find her at a friend’s house or hiding somewhere in a neighbor’s basement.

My mother was the opposite of my father in a lot of ways. He would drink and she wouldn’t. She would get violent and abusive, and he never raised his hand to my sister or me or my mother. Another way was in how they treated the war, responded to it. While my father took every occasion to talk about the past, she never wanted to talk about what happened. If I asked her to tell me something about what had happened in the war, she would ignore me, just turn away. I felt that all of what was bad about our situation, being DPs and having a drunk father and a violent mother, came from the war somehow, but she wouldn’t tell me about it. If I pressed her, all she would say was, “If they give you bread, eat it; if they beat you, run.”

Even when we were living in America and safe at last, she never got much beyond that warning.

Upcoming Poetry Reading

I'll be doing some poetry readings over the next couple weeks and I thought I would mention them here and invite everybody to the readings. In all of the readings, I'll be reading from my two new books about my parents and their experiences in the slave labor camps: Lightning and Ashes and Third Winter of War: Buchenwald.

The first reading is for the lecture series sponsored by the Women's and Gender Studies program at VSU. It will be at 7pm, Tuesday, Sept. 11 at the Bailey Science Center at Valdosta State University.

Here's some info about that and the entire series : http://www.valdosta.edu/womenstudies/UpcomingEvents_000.shtml

The following week I'll be giving a reading at Western Kentucky University, at 7pm, Tuesday, Sept. 18.

The next day, I'll be reading my poems about my parents as part of the Eastern Illinois University conference on World War II and James Jones. The reading is at 3pm, Sept. 19, in the library.

Here's the website with further information:

http://evff.net/conference-schedule-tentative/

All of the above are free and open to the public, but if you can't come, you can hear and see me read on line.

Janusz Zalewski and Henryk Gajewski put together a website of readings from the January 2007 PAHA conference.

Here's that link: http://gajewski.tv/poets/

A Wooden Trunk

When I posted my blog about the wooden trunk my parents carried from Germany, I received a number of comments and emails about wooden trunks and samovars and cooking utensils and other things the Poles who came to this country from the DP camps in Germany brought with them after the war.

[If you want to read the original post, here's the url:
http://lightning-and-ashes.blogspot.com/2007_06_01_archive.html]

One of those emails came from Christiana Conway. Here's what she said.

"I read briefly your blog and wish to tell you I was born in one of those DP camps...Wildflecken, 1946. I also have a trunk just as you described your parents had. It was painted a dark brown outside, and inside it is plain wood with I believe my mom's name stamped on it. I would never have parted with it. I recently acquired it (somehow my brother wound up with it and I discovered this when they were moving. He planed on dumping it at the curb) It is the only piece of memorabilia I own that was of my Mother's and my journey to the USA."

Christiana also sent me a series of pictures of the trunk her parents brought from Wildflecken, the DP camp for Poles that Kathryn Hulme talks about in The Wild Place.

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Here are two of the pictures:

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This is a picture of the trunk from the side. Chris took the photo in her basement.

The next is a picture of the surface of the trunk. If you look closely, you can see some of the lettering beneath the layer of brown paint. Before being painted over, the lettering may have indicated where Christina's parents were coming from or where they were going. Christina is thinking of doing a rubbing of the trunk to see if she can retrieve some of those words that were painted over.

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She says she can make out her mom's name on the lid of the trunk, Marie Chodacka, and under her name, Christiana says she can read, but only barely, the name of Frank Kozak of Clinton, NY, USA. Christiana feels that Frank must have been her family's sponsor to the USA . He was her sister's godfather, and he owned a dairy farm in Clinton. When Christiana was a child, she spent some summers there.

Thanks, Chris.

THIRD WINTER OF WAR: BUCHENWALD

My chapbook about my father’s experiences in Buchenwald has just been published by Finishing Line Press, and I wanted to say something about how I came to write the book and why the book is the way it is, focusing solely on my father Jan Guzlowski.

When I wrote Language of Mules, my first book about my parents, I felt that it was mainly about my mother. Poems like “Cattle Train to Magdeburg,” “Here’s What My Mother Won’t Talk About,” and “My Mother Talks about the Slave Labor Camps” carried a lot of the weight of the book. For me emotionally, they were the points in the book that I always came back to. The last poem I wrote for that book was the long, four-part poem “My Mother Talks about the Slave Labor Camps,” and that poem seemed to make all of the other poems about my mother coalesce around it. They were the poems that I always read when I did poetry readings. In fact, a lot of times at those readings, I would mostly read the poems about my mother in Language of Mules. They had a psychological and emotional unity and power that spoke to me every time. And they seemed to speak to my audiences too. People would invariably ask questions about my mom, but seldom did they ask about my father.

In Lightning and Ashes, my second book about my parents, I wanted to talk about both my parents. They had been together for forty-two years when my dad died in 1997, and I wanted to write about what that life was like, the war that brought them together and the memories of shared suffering that had kept them together despite their differences and their antagonism. The book feels balanced to me. In fact, I sometimes think that my parents are almost having a conversation in that book. My mother talks about her experiences, and then my dad talks about his, and I’m once again a child listening to their talk and trying to make sense of the lives they lived.

I feel that Third Winter of War: Buchenwald is my father’s book. He was a man who could never be quiet about the war, a man who could never put it aside. My mother could, and frequently she’d tell my father he should too, but he couldn’t. The war was always as present as it had been in 1943. He was a man who could talk for hours about the war, with me, if I was around, with strangers if I wasn’t, with himself if no one was around. Sometimes, I would come into a room where he was sitting and he would be having silent conversations. He would be gesturing, grimacing, turning his head this way and that. His lips would be moving, but he wouldn’t be talking. I would ask him what he was going on, and he would relax and smile, and say something like, “I’ve been thinking about the Germans.”

He was a man who prayed every day for the people he knew who died in the war, and he was a man who dreamt nightmares about the war. When I was a child living at home, I would hear his screams. They would wake us all. I don’t think I’ve ever heard screams like that. They were muffled in an odd way. Screams, in my experience, are usually accompanied by an explosion of air. My father’s nightmare screams were drawn in. Even in his sleep, it was almost like he was afraid to scream. I would come to my father’s bedroom, and he would be asleep and screaming and struggling with the Germans who were beating him.

I wanted to write about these nightmares, and by writing about them, I wanted to understand and capture what the war must have been like for him. I wanted to capture the thing that caused his nightmares and the nightmares themselves. I wanted to write about his hungry days searching through the bricks of the bombed cities he was forced to work in, and the threats and beatings he received. I wanted to know what he felt in the third winter of the war when he was in Buchenwald and felt he would never get out.

That’s what I wanted, but what I realized finally was that I could never understand his war or capture it. I would always just be a tourist walking through his experiences with a sketchpad and a pencil.

Third Winter of War is available from Finishing Line Press
http://www.finishinglinepress.com/2006newreleasesandforthcomingtitles.htm

An Interview

I was interviewed last January by Bruce Guernsey of Spoon River Poetry Review, and that journal has recently given me permission to reprint the interview.

If you want to take a look at the interview and a photo of me eating some kind of strange soup, you'll find both at my Everything's Jake blog.

It's at: http://everythings-jake.blogspot.com/

What Krystyna Slowikowska-Farley Told Me

I’m sending out letters this week trying to set up some poetry readings in Illinois or Michigan or Ohio, and I got to thinking about the readings I gave in Connecticut and New York last fall.

I was reading in front of old guys who can't walk now but who ran guns during the Warsaw Uprising when they were 14, 80-year old GIs who helped liberate Dachau and still can’t talk about what they saw in the cement factory, people my age whose parents worked in the slave labor camps in Germany. I feel my parents' lives deeply, and so it means a lot to me to meet and talk with people who were there in the camps and share with them and their children and grandchildren the stories about my parents.

One of the strongest encounters I had was at the Polish Cultural Club of Hartford, Connecticut, a wonderful place with welcoming people, Polish Americans very concerned with maintaining their connection with Poland.

There was a woman there, an elderly Polish woman named Krystyna Slowikowska-Farley, who came to the United States like we did, as a Displaced Person in 1951. She volunteered to read some of the Polish translations of my poems, and I got five poems to her before the reading because I wanted to make sure she was clear about what and when she would read.

(This is a photo of Krystyna in a traditional Polish costume selling raffle tickets with a friend at the Polish Cultural Club.)

She was wonderful. Without hesitation, she critiqued the poems, told me which of my poems wouldn't work because they were "too dreamy" and which poems were "poorly translated." The poems had been translated by an excellent Polish poet and translator, but Krystyna didn't like some of the new words in his translations. She said there was too much English in his Polish.

When I finally asked her if she was ready to read the poems in Polish, she said to me with a smile, "Mister, I was in a slave labor camp in Siberia for three years, I'm ready for anything." When she said that, she sounded so much like my mother, that same kind of courage and readiness. Hearing her matter of fact statement about her time in Siberia, I really felt that Krystyna and my mother had gone through the same curriculum at the same school.

Krystyna did a great job of reading those poems. I watched the audience. There were people nodding their heads, and people weeping. Reading my poems about my parents is always such an emotional experience for me that I'm always on the edge of not being able to go on, but when I heard Krystyna read the poems, it was pure joy, hearing the Polish word, hearing her courage. And I didn't even know much about her, but the people in the audience who knew her and her story must have felt so very very much. I feel they’ll never forget her reading. It was like she had stepped out of the past and stepped out of a grave to talk to them and tell them that she survived no matter what the war did to her.

And my appreciation of her courage and readiness got even stronger when Krystyna and I spoke briefly at the end of my evening of presenting poems.

At every poetry reading, I always read one of the first poems I wrote about my mother. It’s a poem called “Cattle Train to Magdeburg,” about the 4 days my mom spent in the box cars going to Germany, and how even sixty years later she still remembered the trip, still remembered “the box cars bleached to Baltic gray.” After this particular reading at the Polish Cultural Club, Krystyna came up to me. She smiled and looked me in the eye and said, "Listen, your mother spent 4 days in the cattle cars. That was nothing. I spent 2 weeks." And she laughed.

I don't think this was boasting. My mother some times said the same sort of thing when she heard people telling their stories about the terrible things that happened to them during those years. Like I said, I don’t think this was boasting; I think there were a couple things going on instead. One is that people like Krystyna and my mother want you to know that, no matter how bad a time some one had, there are people who had a worse time. The other thing going on is that they really do want you to know how hard it was. My mother spent 4 days in the boxcars, Krystyna spent 2 weeks in the boxcars, Isaac Singer's mother and brother spent 2 winter months in a boxcar. They never left the boxcars. They died some place on a railroad siding in Russia. Their train was just shunted to the side and left there till spring.

Yes, there was always someone who had a worse experience, and that person will tell you about it with a laugh or with tears or with a shaking head. They want you to know that terrible things can happen but that people do survive. They walk out of graves, walk across continents, walk until they can’t walk and then they walk some more.

This is what Krystyna told me.

The Wooden Trunk We Carried with Us from Germany

When my family, my parents, my sister and I, finally left Germany in 1951, we were allowed to bring very little, only what would fit into a steamer trunk. The problem was that we couldn't afford to buy one. Not many of the families living in the camps could. So my father did what other people did. He and a friend got together and built one.

Someplace, somehow, my father and his friend found a hammer and a saw and nails and some metal stripping, and they set to work. Getting the wood wasn’t a problem. They got the wood from the walls of the barracks they were living in. It was one of the old German concentration camps that had been converted to living space for the Displaced Persons, and this place didn’t have finished walls of plaster, or anything like that. If you wanted a board, you could just pull it off of the wall, and that’s what my dad did.

I don’t think he felt guilty about busting up those walls. He had probably spent enough time staring at them, so that he probably felt he could do anything he wanted to them, and it would be okay. I think if a man spends enough time staring at a thing, finally it becomes his by a kind of default. I don’t know if that’s what my dad thought. He didn’t say a lot about building that wooden trunk, and he probably didn’t give it much thought.

The trunk my father and his friend built out of those old boards wasn't big. It was maybe four feet wide and three feet tall and three feet deep. The walls of the trunk were about 3/4 of an inch thick. But wood is always heavy, so that even though it wasn’t that big, that trunk needed two people to lift it.

My parents couldn't get much into the trunk, but they put into what they thought they would need in America and what they didn't want to leave in Germany: some letters from Poland, four pillows made of goose feathers, a black skillet, some photographs of their time in Germany, a wooden cross, some clothing, of course, and wool sweaters that my mother knitted for us in case it was cold in America. Somewhere, I’ve got a picture of me wearing one of those sweaters. It looks pretty good. My mother knitted it before her eyes went bad, and she was able to put little reindeer and stars all over that sweater.

When we finally got to America, my parents didn't trash that wooden trunk or break it up, even though there were times when breaking it up and using the wood for a fire would have been a good idea, kept us warm. Instead, they kept it handy for every move they made in the next forty years. They carried it with them when we had to go to the migrant farmers' camp in upstate New York where we worked off the cost of our passage to America. And my parents carried it to Chicago too when they heard from their friend Wenglaz that Chicago was a good place for DPs. And they carried that trunk to all the roomimg houses and apartment buildings and houses that we lived in in Chicago. I remember in those early days in Chicago that there were times when the only things we owned were the things my mother and father brought with us in that trunk, and the only furniture we had was that trunk. Sometimes it was a table, and sometimes it was a bench, and sometimes it was even a bed for my sister and me.

When we were kids growing up, my sister Donna and I played with the trunk. It had large blocky letters printed on it, the names of the town we came from in Germany, the port we sailed from, and the port we sailed to in America. We would trace the letters with our fingers even before we could read what they said. We imagined that trunk was the boat that brought us to America, and we imagined that it was an airplane and a house. We even imagined that it was a swimming pool, although this got harder to imagine as we got older and bigger.

When my parents retired in 1990 and moved from Chicago to Sun City, Arizona, they carried that trunk with them. That surprised me because they didn’t take much with them when they went to Arizona. They sold or gave away almost everything that they owned, almost everything that they had accumulated in thirty-eight years of living in America. They got rid of bedroom suites and dining room suites, refrigerators and washing machines, ladders and lawnmowers. My parents were never sentimental, and they didn’t put much stock in stuff. They figured it would be easier to buy new tables and couches when they got to Sun City. But they kept that trunk and the things they could put in it. And a TV set.

After my father died in 1997, my mother stayed on in Arizona. She still had the trunk when she died. She kept it in a small, 8 foot x 8 foot utility room off the carport. My parents had tried to pretty it up at some point during their time in Arizona. The original trunk was bare, unpainted wood, and was covered with those big, blocky, white letters I mentioned. But for some reason, my parents had painted the wooden trunk, painted it a sort of dark brown, almost a maroon color; and they had papered the bare wood on the inside of the trunk with wallpaper, a light beige color with little blue flowers.

When my mom died, I was with her. Her dying was long and hard. She had had a stroke and couldn't talk or understand what was said. She couldn't move at all either. When she finally died, I had to make sense of her things. I contacted a real estate agent, and he told me how I could get in touch with a company that would sell off all of my mother's things in an estate sale.

I thought about taking the wooden trunk back home with me to Valdosta, Georgia. I thought about all it meant to my parents and to me, how long it had been with them. How they had carried it with them from the DP camps in Germany to Sun City, Arizona, this desert place so different from anything they had ever known overseas. I knew my sister Donna didn't want the trunk. I called her up, and we talked about the things my mother left behind and the estate sale and the trunk. Donna has spent a lifetime trying to forget the time in the DP camps and what the years in the slave labor camps during the war had cost my parents. But did I want it?

I contacted UPS about shipping it, what it would cost, how I would have to prepare the trunk. They told me it would cost about $150 to ship. But did I want it?

I finally decided to leave it there and to let it get sold off at the estate sale. That wooden trunk had been painted over, and the person buying it wouldn't know anything about what it was and how it got there. It would just be an anonymous, rough-made trunk, painted a dark brown, almost maroon color with some goofy wallpaper inside.

Thinking back on all of this now, I'm not sure I know why I left that trunk there. When I'm doing a poetry reading and tell people the story of the trunk and read one of my poems about it, people ask me why I left it. It doesn't make any kind of sense to them. And I'm not sure now that it makes any kind of sense to me either. Why did I leave it?

I was pretty much used up by my mom's dying. It had been hard. My mother went into the hospital for a gall bladder operation and had had that stroke, and the stroke left her paralyzed, confused, and weak. She couldn’t talk or move, and the doctor told me that my mother couldn’t even understand what was being said to her.

Her condition got worse, and I put her in a hospice in Sun City. I sat with her there for three weeks, watched her breathing get more and more still. Sometimes, her eyes would open, and she would look around. I would talk to her about things I remembered, her life and my father’s life, my life and my sister’s life. I don’t know if she understood anything. She couldn’t blink or nod, or make sounds with her mouth. I just talked to her about what I remembered, any stupid thing, the bus rides we took, the TV shows she always watched, the oleanders she and my dad liked to grow and plant in the backyard. I didn't think that there was much else I could do for her.

When she died, I didn't want to do anything except get back home to my wife Linda in Georgia. Maybe the extra burden of figuring out how to carry that trunk back to Georgia was more than I could deal with. Or maybe I thought that trunk wasn't the same trunk that my parents had brought from the concentration camp in Germany. It had been painted, changed. Or maybe I just wanted that trunk to slip away into memory the way my mother had slipped away, become a part of my memory, always there but not there.

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A version of this essay appears in my recent book Echoes of Tattered Tongues.